http://www.amazon.com/Social-History-Deccan-13001761-Cambridge/dp/0521254841/ref=sr_1_5/102-0530440-8332113?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175824676&sr=1-5

and with style!

Sebouh Aslanian kicked things off with a detailed and provocative examination of Armenian merchants transition from a ‘trans-imperial cosmopolitan’ ethics into a territorialized nationalism starting in the mid-18th c. I found especially compelling his argument that the concept of diaspora is too over taken as a trans-historical category whereas it should be understood in the context of the nation-state concept.

Mana Kia followed with a probing analysis of the increasing importance of place of origin among Persophone Shias in Iran and India at the beginning of the 19th c. Particularly productive, I though, were the connections she suggested between the Mughal valuation of the Persian language idiom of writers from Iran, and the later yoking of linguistic identity to the Iranian nation-state.

My own paper used writings about Hyderabad State or by its’ officials in the late 19th/early 20th c. to argue that colonial networks provided the conditions for Muslim modernists to conceive and disseminate alternative global political visions. This Islamist internationalist moment, however, was foreclosed by both the British regulation of these connections, which fizzled into territorial and exclusivist nationalist ideas.

Engseng Ho as chair-discussant stole the show, as is his habit. He described the papers as thematically linked in that they all examined last moments of global connection before parochialization and the narrowing of mental horizons.

Needless to say your absence, Sepoy, was deeply felt. Not only because we missed your characteristically spirited and challenging contributions to the academic (and other) conversations – which of course we did –, but also because your paper had promised to look at the mid-19th c. recrudescence of countervailing connections in the Islamicate world. Engseng had a few brief comments in which he tried to cover the gaping hole our papers left of the bulk of the nineteenth century, but quite truly only a valiant sepoy like yourself could have bridged the gap. Perhaps you can offer us some further nuggets from the paper that would have been in this space at some point.

There is indeed a clearly discernable bias in the NYT article, but I was hoping for your view on the mentioned verse itself.

As despicable as it is for the NYT to publish an attack disguised as an article on a scholarly undertaking, your post seems to be an emotional response to the nature of the article; I would have loved to see you challenge the “translation” with your own interpretation of the same.

The NYT publishes with the headline, “New Translation Prompts Debate on Islamic Verse” on a translation which hasn’t been published yet [hence cannot possibly be generating any debate] and by an author who does not know the language of the Quran and cannot possibly know/understand/comprehend the 1300 years of ‘debate’ on that very verse in millions of pages of commentaries done on the Quran.

It may be hard for NYT’s editors to ascertain but a 10th reading of Lane does not - I repeat, does not - entitle one to any opinion on any word in the Quran or any other Arabic text…if one is illiterate in that language - and most specifically in Classical Arabic.

So, I ask myself. What is the point of that NYT piece? You know which commentary of the Quran they cite in the article - out of the hundreds of thousands of commentaries written since the 9th century? Sayyid Qutb - the al-Qaeda ‘idealogue’.

That, my friend, is a hit piece on a religion in our liberal paper of record.

Is it just me, or is the self-loathing Cubs fan section of the Greenberg profile just way inappropriate? Wasn’t it long enough?

And Soros is a morass of self-contradictions. Which isn’t at all unusual for people talking about Middle East/American politics, but in his case it really hurts towards the end.